Creditcents: Credit and Personal Finance Blog from Creditnet.com

When people envision a person with bad credit, they may imagine a worn down casino dweller who has visited the wrong loan shark one or two many times. But in reality, most people with bad credit are much more like the guy or girl next door. Bad credit can happen to normal, everyday Americans who have never made any life-destroying decisions or been careless with their money.

I purchased my first gallon of eggnog today, which officially marks the beginning of the holiday season in my mind. Let the overspending and overeating begin! Chances are you'll kick off the holidays this week with a tradition or two of your own. And if you're anything like the majority of people in this country, at least part of the excitement will include shopping like a crazy person. But before you hit the malls on Black Friday or your favorite websites on Cyber Monday, you may want to follow these 5 steps to make sure you're well prepared for the full-frontal assault your wallet is about to take.

Your credit card is much more than a piece of plastic. It’s a status symbol. It’s an expression of your personality. It’s how you open your beer in a pinch.

The credit card has come a long way since the Diners Club of 1950. Now with more benefits and custom options than ever before, credit card companies are doing everything to attract customers. Even redesigning the credit card itself.

Introducing the top 10 best credit card designs:

10. Epos Card

Epos released a spectacular lineup of artistic credit cards in 2009. Here are just a few of their 100 jaw-dropping designs:

Dear Creditnet: I know Capital One credit cards don't charge foreign exchange fees, but I'm frankly not a big fan of Capital One. Are there any other credit issuers offering the same perk with a no annual fee credit card? I travel overseas a lot for both play and work, so a credit card with no foreign exchange fees would save me a lot of dough.

Credit cards can be a major pain in the neck. With annoyances like payment dates, interest charges, and annual fees, it's easy to become fed up. So after years of headaches, you’ve decided to do away with credit cards once and for all by destroying your credit. While we here at Creditnet would strongly advise against this decision, this is America, so who are we to stop you from doing what you want? In all honesty, you’ll be happy to know that despite spending all those years garnering an excellent credit score, demolishing it can be easy as pie.

Black Friday is just around the corner! And whether that conjures up feelings of intense excitement or the urge to lose your lunch, the fact is you'll probably spend more time over the next few months than any other season wandering through crowded malls and surfing the web for the perfect gift. To an identity thief, this means one thing—extra opportunities to nab your credit card information and put a real damper on your holiday cheer! So be a smart shopper this year and take some additional precautions to protect yourself from identity theft and ensure your bank accounts, credit reports and credit scores stay safe and sound.

That shiny piece of plastic burning a rectangle-shaped hole in your wallet is one of life's trickiest necessities.

On the one hand, you can't make it much farther than 25 without some line of credit to show for yourself.

On the other, credit cards are often intimidating: whole episodes of Oprah are dedicated to really good people with decades' worth of credit card debt they didn’t mean to accrue. You're a good person. Does that mean you are going to accrue a Kilimanjaro-sized mountain of debt as well?

Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard professor appointed by Obama to get the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) up and running, sat down with the LA Times earlier this week for a Q&A session.

If you missed it and still have lingering questions about what it is Warren and the CFPB will be focusing on in the coming months, I highly recommend checking out the full interview for all the details.

Remember AmEx's announcement early this year that cardholders could now use membership rewards points to pay their taxes? Since it's always annoyed me that we can't pay taxes with a credit card for free, I, for one, was excited when I heard there was a new option for paying taxes online. That is, until I dug a little deeper into the conversion rate and realized what a waste it would be to drop 200 rewards points for every $1 in taxes due. That's 400,000 points for a $2,000 tax bill—ridiculous!

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